Winchester County
A Short Story
Excerpt B
The only part of the opening sequence that Tyler did not love concerned the horses. He liked horses, especially horses running full out, huckledy-buck. But he had never really cared for the spotted kind, what Pillsbury called Palamentos. Tyler thought horses, real wild-western horses should either be all black or all brown. Horses certainly should not look like Dalmatians, which was a kind of dog that his grandmother in Wichita used to have before she died of smoking – grandma, not the Dalmatian—and they sent her to a shelter – the Dalmatian, not grandma—because no one wanted to take care of her. In any case, there was just something wrong about big Dalmatians pulling a stagecoach and when the opening of Winchester County showed those horses, Tyler winced just a little inside his tiny chest and wished that all four of those horses pulling that stage coach were either all brown or all black. Sometimes he squinted so that he could barely see them, just to make it so.
On this evening, as his father sat in the kitchen stripping fried meat with his teeth from chicken bones and reading a magazine, and as Mrs. Davis the upstairs neighbor ran her vacuum like she was trying to destroy the place, and as the late summer air pressed with both hands and with some desperation against the small window on the far side of the room that, for want of a crank, did not open, Tyler lay in the failing light, on the couch, sandwiched between the worn green cushion and the ratty blue pillow, stunned.